Hitler's Terror Weapons by Brooks, Geoffrey (life books to read .txt) 📗

State institutions and state-controlled or subsidized laboratories of industry in National Socialist Germany were subject to the provisions of the racial law of 7 April 1933 which proscribed Jews and various other categories of people from employment. As von Ardenne’s laboratory was privately owned he was not bound by this legislation, could employ whomsoever he wanted and had made it known that he was prepared to assist in suitable cases. In May 1940 Professor Max von Laue suggested he should employ the Jewish nuclear physicist Fritz Georg Houtermans.

An Austrian national with a Jewish mother and Dutch father, Houtermans was a Communist and in National Socialist Germany his circumstances could hardly have been less favourable. He had obtained his PhD at Göttingen in 1927 and was Assistant Professor at the University of Berlin by 1933. His special field was chain reaction theory. In 1935 he accepted a position in the Soviet Union at the Ukraine Institute of Physics in Kharkov and in 1937 lectured on neutron absorption to the Soviet Academy of Science. That same year, together with other foreign communists, he was imprisoned and tortured during Stalin’s great purge. In 1939 the Russians offered him rehabilitation and a full restoration of his former offices, together with Soviet citizenship, but he declined on the grounds of their maltreatment. For a Jewish Communist to prefer to take his chances with the Nazis in 1939 speaks volumes for what type of place Soviet Russia must have been at that time.

The following year he was handed over to the Gestapo at Brest-Litovsk. Paroled into the custody of Professor von Laue on the condition that he remained under Gestapo observation and did not engage in any State or University research project, Houtermans was thus placed with von Ardenne. In August 1944 Houtermans issued a report from the Reich Bureau of Standards, a State office, which indicates that for the purposes of the Civil Service law he had been reclassified as a non-Jew. 76 What he must have done in the meantime to achieve this turnaround is suggested further on in this chapter.

Houtermans started work with von Ardenne on 1 January 1941. His most significant work at Lichterfelde-Ost was the report published in August 1941 describing the building of a zero-energy breeder reactor for plutonium which caused the furore with Heisenberg.

The Underground Developments at Lichterfelde-Ost

In his autobiography77 von Ardenne stated that, because of his arrangement with Ohnesorge to install the cyclotron, an apparatus which required the personnel using it to be shielded against radiation, he now had a reason for requesting the construction of several large underground concrete bunkers at his Lichterfelde-Ost institute.

The main bunker was ten metres down and had a floor area of 100 square metres. The steel-reinforced concrete walls and ceiling were 1² metres thick and, needless to say, this would have given enough radiation protection to the occupants of the house and the neighbours against whatever might have been going on in the bunker. Adjacent to it was a smaller bunker housing the 250 kW transformer station and next to that, but without a connecting door, an air-raid bunker measuring six metres square.

This underground complex was ready by the late autumn of 1942 which was, as von Ardenne confirms, just before the step-up in bombing activity over German cities in which Berlin was to become the major target. He added that he had made up his mind to put all the most valuable instrumentation and the important installations into a small area of the bunker in a working condition, but according to his diary of events added as an Appendix, the main evacuation of the laboratory did not take place until 1 August 1943. There is, therefore, a period of about nine months between the autumn of 1942 and the end of July 1943 when the use of the greater part of the main bunker has not been accounted for, and at a time when Berlin was being subjected to extremely severe air raids. Moreover, von Ardenne mentioned that Professor Houtermans had been overjoyed at the chance to use a cyclotron, of which the only other such model available in all of Germany was at Miersdorf. Use of the machine had also been promised to Professor Hahn as a means of forging a closer relationship with Hahn’s Berlin-Dahlem circle, but von Ardenne’s cyclotron was never operational “because of the air war”. So it came about that the cyclotron, the purpose for which the bunker complex had been built, an invaluable apparatus of which only one other model existed in the Reich in 1942, and a source of envy to all, was never completed.

The Lichterfelde-Ost cyclotron was an excuse: the bunkers were obviously constructed for war work with radioactive materials. They were, in fact, the laboratory where the prototype V-4 was to be built. Heisenberg’s Leipzig experiment was to be continued by Houtermans.

Contaminated Uranium Delays Project

When the Heereswaffenamt ordered the changeover from uranium oxide yellow-cake to uranium metal powder in December 1940, the manufacturer Degussa turned out a metal which was contaminated by calcium from the thermic reduction process. The plant was small and had a production capacity of one tonne of metal per month. There were only six workers, but output never reached capacity. Throughout his 1941 report, Professor Houtermans had stressed the importance of using the purest metallic uranium to reduce the capture of neutrons by impurities. The Degussa product was not good in this respect.

According to the returns, all the uranium metal produced in Germany during the war was allegedly cast at one of the two Degussa plants and totalled about 14 tonnes. Nine tonnes was powder and five tonnes plates or cubes. It was reported that the reduction of the oxide to metal powder in quantity and to a high specification was not an economical enterprise in Germany. This is not a very convincing statement, but, if true, one assumes that the material would have been imported. Uranium metal powder is fine, grey